From long skirts to gymslips via Renaissance Italy

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The Hockey Museum » Kit, Clothing and Equipment » School, College and University Hockey » Women's Hockey » From long skirts to gymslips via Renaissance Italy

July 10, 2024

A group of eleven young women, members of the Bergman-Österberg Physical Training College hockey team, pose for a photograph in the garden of a large house. They are positioned next to steps leading up to a small veranda covered in ivy and a large bay window. The women are posed in three three rows: the back row of three women are standing on the veranda, the middle row of five are standing on the grass with the furthest right player seated on the veranda edge by the steps. Three seated women form the front row: two on chairs and one on the grass. They are all wearing long-sleeved, dark blouses with billowing arms under dark grey, tunic-like dresses. The dresses are gymslips which have a wide, open neck with thick shoulder straps and reach down to the knee. They are wearing leather hockey shoes and each holds a hockey stick by their side or laying on the grass in front of them.

In the last decade of the 19th century hockey for women was described as, “being recognized as a very valuable team game. It is a very satisfying form of self-expression of all that is in need of outlet in the healthy, active woman of today”. How it was possible to be very active in the playing uniform of the day is quite remarkable, consisting as it did of a long, thick, serge skirt, fastened at the waist with a tight belt and worn with a stiff collared, high-necked blouse with large, long sleeves. Petticoats were worn under the skirt and a hat worn on the head, all to comply with the accepted standard of dress for young ladies expected at the time. Playing on a wet day increased the weight of the skirts and petticoats and it doesn’t take much imagination to realise the difficulties the early pioneers of our game had to endure, as well as the disapproval of elderly matrons who strongly disapproved of young ladies taking part in sporting activities. One young lady, clutching her hockey stick on her way to play for Wimbledon Ladies Hockey Club was chased down the road by an older lady brandishing an umbrella who called her, “a disgrace to your sex”. Many players in those days did not go out with their parents’ blessing, quite a few found it necessary to creep out by the back door while fathers and mothers were having an afternoon nap in the drawing room.

The Bergman-Österberg Physical Training College First Eleven wearing an early ‘gymslip’ design, 1896-97.
From the Ethel Adair Roberts’ album; courtesy of The Österberg Collection.

Change was to come at the instigation of Martina Bergman-Österberg who was the founder in the late 1880s of the first Physical Training college for women, the Hampstead Gymnasium, later known as Dartford College of Physical Education after the college’s relocation to Dartford in 1895. It was Madame Österberg who brought us the games mistress, the ‘gymslip’ and physical activities such as gymnastics and games for schoolgirls. By the early 1890s the games her students were playing were tennis and cricket, wearing loose-fitting, long-sleeved gymnastic costumes unhindered by stays or petticoats. One of the students, Miss Mary Tait, went one better by designing a simple pleated tunic which reached the ground when the wearer knelt. Part of the inspiration for the design of the tunic may have come from a painting viewed by Madame Österberg in the National Gallery, Portrait of a Young Man by Andea del Sarto, c.1517.

For some time, there was a variation in length and material and the choice of blouse worn underneath, but by 1897 the new ‘gymslip’ was adopted by many schools and indeed became the everyday uniform for girls’ schools well into the 20th century.

A photo-realistic oil painting from the Italian Renaissance. A pale-skinned young man sits in a wooden chair with his body facing left, his back slightly turned away but his head turning to face the viewer. He is holding an open book in his hands as if disturbed from reading. He is wearing a soft-fabric black hat with brown curly hair falling over his ears and across the back of his neck. The hat he wears has three points (jutting out at the front and either side of his head over his ears); the angular features of his nose and chin reflect the pointed shape of his hat. The man wears a loose-fitting, light blue blouse with billowing sleeves over a simple white shirt. Both garments are covered by a black tunic that might be a kind of painter's overall.

Portrait of a Young Man by Andrea del Sarto. Acquired by the National Gallery, London in 1862. Oil on linen, c.1517. Might this be the painting that inspired Mary Tait and Martina Bergman-Österberg to conceive the iconic ‘gymslip’?
© Copyright The National Gallery, London. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Appreciate the painting in high resolution detail on the National Gallery website.

The new college in Dartford had 14 acres of ‘pleasure grounds’ and there was ample room for a hockey pitch. The Bergman-Österberg Physical Training College hockey team of 1898/1899 are pictured wearing the new tunics which would have undoubtedly given them an advantage when playing against other teams dressed in the more traditional style of the end of the 19th century. In 1910 one of the Dartford students stirred up a hornets’ nest when, selected to play hockey for Kent, she arrived to play in her college tunic. With the rest of the players wearing regulation skirts, less than six inches from the ground, her action led to the appearance of a letter in the Hockey Field magazine on 27 January 1910.

“Dear Madam, the attention of many hockey players has been drawn by their parents and guardians to the various portraits that have appeared of Kent’s new outside left who plays for the County in her College tunic. That costume is without doubt ideal in that it cannot hamper the movements of the wearer; but at the same time it does not suit itself to public grounds. To show the adoption of this dress for public matches may prove detrimental to hockey. I quote an extract from a letter received by a county player from her fiancé. ‘Please look at page 874 of the Sporting and Dramatic and see the awful apparition who plays for Kent. If there is any chance of you wearing kit like that my foot comes down bang and you have no more hockey.’”

What would the author of this letter and the county player’s fiancé think of the kit worn by the players of today?

A black and white photograph of five women in a line facing the camera. They stand in front of a grass field, presumably a hockey pitch with a hedgerow in the background. They are all wearing long-sleeved blouses/shirts, either white or darker shades, under black, tunic-like dresses. The dresses are gymslips which have a wide, open neck with thick shoulder straps and reach down to the knee. Three of the women are wearing shin pads and all are wearing stockings and leather shoes. They each hold a hockey stick by their side.

Kathleen Doman, Hilda Light, Edith Rebecca Clarke, Joyce Wolton and Ursula Doris Bellchamber (née Croxton-Smith), taken c.1918-20. Doman (1917), Clarke (1906) and Wolton (1914) were Bergman-Österberg Physical Training College alumni.
Courtesy of The Österberg Collection.

A black and white engraving in which seven women in various actions in competing for the ball during a hockey match. They have long dark skirts almost down to their angles fastened with a belt, dark stockings and black hockey shoes. Their torsos are covered by white blouses down their wrists and a black tie each. They have cloth badges with the emblems of their hockey teams sewn on to their breast pockets. Each wields a wooden hockey stick with a long hooked head. In the background a crowd of Victorian-era spectators, men and women, with hats, bonnets and mufflers form a line along the edge of the pitch.

England women play Ireland at Richmond on 11 March 1901. Illustration by Fred Pegram, reproduced in The Sphere on 23 March. Neither the national, territorial or county teams were quick to adopt the innovative attire of the Physical Training colleges.